The present invention relates to portable electronic computers and more particularly, to a portable electronic computer (hereinafter simply referred to as a portable computer) which has a digital camera or video camera, a display unit and the personal digital assistant function including a communication function to permit transmission of data inclusive of images to an external system and which can display an image photographed by the digital camera or an image from the external system such as a server on the display unit.
The portable computer having the camera function and the function to communicate with the external system has hitherto been known and with the computer, an object can be photographed by the video camera and the thus obtained image can be transmitted to the server by communication means so as to be recorded and saved in the server. The computer as above also has the display screen in the form of a liquid crystal display panel to enable the image taken by the video camera or the image read out of the server to be displayed on the display screen.
The portable computer of the aforementioned type has an increasing tendency toward size reduction and concomitantly, there arise problems in connection with the size of the display screen and the arrangement of the operation board.
More specifically, when the cabinet or casing of the computer is decreased in size, the display screen is allowed to be decreased in size proportionately only at the cost of visibility of images to be displayed on the display screen. Therefore, the extent of reduction in size of the display screen is limited and the size cannot be decreased excessively. Consequently, with the cabinet compacted, the percentage of the area occupied by the display screen increases.
On the other hand, even in this type of computer, the operation board for video camera and image display is of course needed and typically, it is disposed near the display screen. But as the display screen occupies a larger area, the area occupied by the operation board is inevitably reduced correspondingly or proportionately, with the result that the operation keys are decreased in size and cannot be operated with ease. To prevent such inconvenience, it is conceivable that touch keys for various kinds of function are displayed on the display screen. But the image to be displayed on the display screen narrowed sympathetically with the size reduction of the cabinet is small and overlap display of the touch keys aggravates visibility of images to be displayed.
Especially, the function of scrolling an image displayed on the display screen in up-down direction or in left-right direction is indispensable for the computer and means for implementing this function (scroll unit) is indispensably needed. The scroll unit, however, must have the function of carrying out scroll in at least four directions (up, down, left and right directions) and hence requires a relatively large space. Accordingly, with the computer compacted, the arrangement of the scroll unit matters significantly.
Besides, in the portable computer, it is desirable that various function extension units be provided without impairing good portability of the computer.
The present invention contemplates elimination of the above problems and it is an object of the present invention to provide a portable electronic computer in which a scroll unit can be arranged with a spatial margin and good operationability of scrolling can be maintained.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a portable electronic computer which can easily implement function extension without impairing portability.
To accomplish the above objects, a portable electronic computer according to one aspect of the invention incorporates a video camera or a digital camera and has scroll levers for scrolling an image displayed on a display screen on the side surface of a cabinet provided with the display screen.
A portable electronic computer according to another aspect of the present invention comprises:
a cabinet including a top case, a bottom case and at least one middle case;
a flat display unit mounted to the top case so as to be visible from outside;
a circuit board mounted to the bottom case and having the function of a digital camera unit and the personal digital assistant function; and
a function extension unit mounted to the middle case so as to be interposed between the display unit and the circuit board and being adapted to extend the function of the camera unit or the personal digital assistant function.
An embodiment of the function extension unit is a disk unit for supplementing a shortage of capacity of a built-in memory. Preferably, the disk unit includes a hard disk unit, an optical disk unit, an optomagnetic disk unit or a magnetic disk such as a floppy disk. Another embodiment of the function extension unit includes a public line connection medium such a wireless or wired communication line modem and a short-distance wireless connection medium such as a contactless IC card data transmitting/receiving unit or a short-distance wireless network connection transmitting/receiving unit. Still another embodiment of the function extension unit includes an extension board for improving the fundamental performance of the portable computer (such as a graphic accelerator) and a large-capacity battery for prolonging usable time of the portable computer.